The American Dream is alive and well (but only if you're willing to let it breathe)
My six-year old daughter could teach many adults a thing or two about what truly matters.
My six-year-old daughter came into my office the other day and asked for a “new new NEW notebook with no pictures or words or anything in it at all except lines.” When I asked why she needed a clean notebook, she said, “So I can write a story of my own.”
Gave her that notebook so fast my fingers got hot. Then I watched her grab a pencil and sit down, start scratching. She even called her Mimi (my mom) after to read the few sentences she'd written, the start of her story.
My partner and I listened to her read-aloud sesh with moon-pie eyes, proud of her go-get-em attitude and absolute lack of share-shame (something many adults could use more of, to be honest), but while standing there, grinning like a fool as she read aloud, I realized something:
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Now let’s talk about what children can teach their parents about dreams . . .
While witnessing our daughter work through her story in progress, my partner and I saw ourselves, saw that our reasons for pursuing creative lives are still relevant and important. We saw how creation begets creation, how even stories within the walls of our home shape our experiences and ignite our passions. We saw our processes play out in front of us, our often-and-outloud shares, scratched concepts, and partial projects, our tenacity and determination to keep moving forward despite the challenges of creation in a world that so often chooses not to value creative output. Maintaining a childlike joy for the act of creation is critical to the pursuit of art. Yet, it’s not always easy to maintain that joy, especially when facing rejection, whether real or imagined.
While the normie adults of the world are debating the pros and cons of artificial intelligence application, my six-year-old displayed creative intelligence and intuition and threw herself into processes that scare those same normies away from trying new things, fulfilling their passions, or chasing their dreams.
Fear of judgment, fear of shame, fear of newness, fear of discomfort, fear of change, fear of work is something we must put away entirely if we truly believe in the power and purpose of the capital-D Dream.
The American Dream is only available to those who individuate and innovate
The American Dream is passion and discovery. It’s westward-bound hope on cross-country highways—gas stations, greasy spoons, and motels linked by heart-led wanderers, travelers on the road to destiny. It’s connection and convention and deliberate choices to go one’s own way. The American Dream is the art that runs through the veins of the nation, veins that have been opened, spilling prayers and platitudes and pushing away entrenched consumption that otherwise hinders creativity. It’s haunting and full of grief and uplifting and full of triumph.
The American Dream is creative intelligence, the ability to see that which can be while staring into the desolation of that which is. It’s seeing the mountains and coloring them purple; it’s looking at clouds and witnessing dragons. It’s planting a victory garden without knowing whether you’ll be around for the harvest, whether you’ll taste those sweet fruits or whether they’ll be left to drop, rotted, to the waiting earth. Regardless of what becomes of those apples, the American Dream is the seed of possibility. And children are the best representations we have of those seeds manifest.
The American Dream says that anyone, regardless of their background or circumstances, can be prosperous through hard work and determination. It’s a fundamental part of the United States’ national identity and has been for generations, the idea itself baked into the ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Yet, todays Dreamers place strange emphasis on material wealth rather than prosperity, distill the Dream to a degree, a home, a career, and a family—a bucket list of debts and tradeoffs. Working hard to get ahead remains the only way to achieve the Dream, but the type of hard work required is different than many assume.
My partner has said before that the American Dream is broken, that the Dream is only available to the nepo-babies of the nation, the ones born with spoons of precious metals lodged in their throats and whose banks have been fattened like prized hogs. But chalking up the American Dream as an ideal out of reach to the masses is to adopt an outlook of apathy, which is nothing more than fear of change and work propagated by those same nepo-babies scrambling to retain their power and cultural influence despite not having a lick of the discipline necessary to have created such influence in the first place.
Yet, so many of us work, day in and day out, to make the nepo-babies’ dreams reality. We’re dog-tired after long days and stressful evenings, unwittingly committed to mindless time on the couch, too exhausted to lift our hands and work for and on ourselves. The Potato Matrix, which lures us in with comfy pants, addictive snacks, and bingeable television, is real and curated exclusively for us by the parasitic class, which ruthlessly protects its power and influence, reserving creativity and art for itself while the worker-bee underlings operate the industrial machine.
While the wealthy parasitic class is apparently terrified of change, I don’t see any of that fear in what Sam Kahn calls “the creative underclass,” to which my partner and I belong, and which, more and more, is throwing itself directly into the path of fear by intentionally loosing the influences of the old and tired parasitic class currently trying to force apathetic consumerism on us all. We’re unafraid of change, unafraid to be different because being different is what sets our work apart. It’s what individuates us and allows us to innovate.
In his essay, Sam writes:
What goes astonishingly unnoticed in these creative debates — and throughout people’s entire careers — is that the writing style in a blog, a Substack, in new media, is both loose and form-fitting. Good or bad, it is the person’s expression. What appears in The New York Times, however prestigious it may be, seen by however many people, is a corset — it is a prescribed house style that makes everybody sound like everybody else. And as often as not, it is somebody else — the publications have rewrite men, who may well surgically alter the pieces to fit the publication, and the name on the byline really doesn’t mean much at all.
The cultural-influence corset of the old and tired gatekeepers perched atop their perceived upper-class thrones want creative people to squeeze into pre-defined boxes shaped by someone else, lest we become too cumbersome or curmudgeonly—too creative—to control. The gatekeepers want us all to continue producing for them, to continue to work hard to realize their dreams, keep them up on those upper-class thrones as exemplars of possibility.
Loosing the corset on the capital-D Dream uncovers a big and important message:
Creative people get to determine what is possible. We get to define style and form. We get to express as we see fit, regardless of prestige or medium or thrones or perceived limitations. We get to define the next movements in culture. We get to bare our creative breasts to the world, our heaving hearts full of stories and songs and paintings and dance, uninhibited, attracting counterculture, urging rebellion. We get to decide what the American Dream looks like.
Gatekeepers hate that.
Dreamers are in the business of blasting apart gates
Despite his insistence on the brokenness of the Dream, my partner’s continued focus on his creative endeavors lends itself to a different narrative, one of hope. Because he and I both know the American Dream is not truly broken. It is, however, only available and accessible to those of us willing to roll up our sleeves and get to the hard work, the hardest work of our lives: Individuation and innovation.
Gatekeepers would rather we dutifully put on our socio-cultural corsets, conform to styles and systems not built for us, styles and systems that abuse us, make us sick, and blight our spirits. In a world of conformity, underclass art is too personal, to intimate to keep the gatekeepers comfortable behind their parasitic-class walls. In a world of conformity, underclass art is taboo, pornographic; the life of the innovative artist viewed as one of irresponsbility and debauchery.
Dreamers need not don artistic corsets that tuck in and strap down our “unmentionables.” Instead, we must expose those unmentionables, explore them, observe them in their natural habitats, figure out where and whether they truly belong to best bring forth their eccentric magic. We can be ourselves, positively boxless, eccentric as we want, and free.
Innovators, those who realize their Dreams, never climb someone else’s ladder. They build their own ladders, creating from passion rather than creating for a fleeting and half-asleep consumer-drone market driven by apathy. Creating from passion is the kind of work we of the creative underclass must relentlessly pursue, hard and thankless as it may be, in the face of consumerist apathy.
Truly, passion is the eccentricity we need to realize our American Dreams.
Passion is both the key to the pursuit of and the lock which opens the Dream
Passion often gets a bad reputation in the arts world, and I’ve read through (and dismissed) lots of think pieces that deride passion as an act of folly, mostly in frustration that the pieces seemed to miss that passion is a tool, a lever to pull, not a state of being.
Donald Maass, renowned literary agent and craft writer, explained the importance of passion-led writing in his book, The Fire in Fiction, in which he identifies the differences between status seekers and storytellers. He writes:
Storytellers have a more realistic grasp of retail realities. They may promote, but locally and not for long. They’ll put up a website, maybe, then it’s back to work on the next book. That’s smart. The truth, for newer authors anyway, is that the best promotion is between the covers of the last book.
He later goes on to write:
Storytellers take calculated risks with their fiction. Mostly they try to make their stories bigger.
Therein lies the essense of why storytellers succeed where status seekers fail: Storytellers seem annointed, but they are annointed by readers. Give readers stories that blow them away every time and they will become the loyal generators of the sales that make career success appear effortless.
Status seekers are folks who write to the consumerist market and find themselves perpetually chasing their tails, their readers, their paychecks, their stability, their careers. This is exactly what the parasitic class wants. For if people are too busy seeking validation from the parasitic class and its power structures, they won’t recognize or value the intrinsic validation that comes from creating for themselves, realizing their own Dreams.
Passion, on the other hand, is the tool which allows the true storyteller, the Dreamer, to pen those blow-’em-away stories that reach into the hearts of their readers. Passion demands individuation and innovation and, ultimately, when extrapolated to careers, belief in the American Dream.
The American Dream is a cognitive test
For a long time, belief in my American Dream wavered. Long evenings spent ruminating over red notices, collections letters, and fiat-based threats will do that to a person. After more than a decade spent paying back a few years of staved-off adulthood within the safety of a college campus, hindsight showed me what, perhaps, should have been obvious (how we learn and grow!): The American Dream is alive and well but is available only to those who will push through their fears and relentlessly pursue their individuality to foster their innovation and creativity.
The American Dream is The Tower made manifest by the persistent madness of those who chase it. There’s desctruction, yes. Still, creative seeds emerge anew under the illuminating sun, burst through the dry brush, threaten the wasteland of consumerist sameness, and introduce fresh beauty, infuse hope.
The risk, sacrifice, and work required to achieve anything resembling the Dream tests the fortitude of even the strongest believers, some of whom lose their connections to the material world, including material security, during the pursuit. But the folks who push through the fear, push through the chaos and heartbreak? Those who trudge through periods of disbelief, periods of inevitable fiat slavery, periods of uncomfortable molting as they change into newer, stronger versions of themselves?
Those who push forward despite the heartache and stress along that often sad and sorry path are the only ones who make it to the end, the only ones who achieve their Dreams.
To fail the cognitive tests is to quit iterating, quit trying, quit creating.
To succeed is to persist until the trail of failures leads to achievement.
Achieving the Dream is not and has never been easy
Hindsight would have many of us believe that it was somehow a lot easier “back then” to pursue the American Dream.
It wasn’t.
The majority of Americans today and in the past accept someone else’s definition of what constitutes a good life, accept the idea that, to get ahead, they must work toward someone else’s dream. Like a socio-cultural dressing room, it’s easier to let someone else tell you what you ought to pursue or achieve rather than practicing self-determination and walking your own path. It’s easier to work for someone else to collect a steady paycheck than it is to find sufficient work to create your own income. It’s easier to prioritize external validation than it is to cultivate internal validation.
The day I walked away from my corporate career, I walked away from a salary pushing six figures and a host of employee benefits that kept me and my family feeling secure while living mostly paycheck to paycheck. But the breaking point came when the company made a decision so far outside my principles and values that I saw it as a gross ethics violation. I either needed to accept a continued paycheck for unethical work by an unethical organization or leave the organization without knowing where I may go next.
Leaving the corporate environment without a safety net on which to fall back was one of the scariest things I’ve ever had to do. I was terrified I’d let down my family, who relied on my income to get by. I was terrified I’d limit opportunity for my growing daughter who’s not even old enough to think long term about her own future of work. But when I walked into the heart of my home and my family where I still stand today, I know the hardest part of my decision was in rebellion.
I’m rather risk averse. I dislike being in trouble, dislike consequences, and generally try to get along without ruffling too many feathers. There are lots of people like me: People-pleasers. I’m now a recovering people-pleaser, but I had to accept the fact that the people I was subconsciously trying to please were the same people forcing me into socio-cultural corsetting. Quietly, I gave the company executives a piece of my mind, dropped off my equipment, and never looked back.
Right now, I’m living my version of the American Dream. I work with publishers and authors I respect on books I love. I write stories and share them. My partner and I get to be fully present for our homestudy daughter and on our homestead, where we’re rewilding the suburbs and growing organic food. We’re creating for ourselves a life we love living every single day. No more cases of the Mondays, no more racing toward Fridays, no more potato-matrix weekends. Yet, none of this is easy.
My daughter knows what hard work looks like because she sees it and participates in it every day. And she understands that creativity is the path to a dream life because she’s helped us create this Dream.
The hard work you do on yourself today will help you realize your Dream tomorrow
Yes, the American Dream is alive and well and available to you if you’re willing to do the deep and hard work of individuating and innovating. It’s time to ask yourself: Are you truly alive and well?
Are you exhausted all the time from work you hate for a company you’d love to see burn to the ground? Are you losing sleep from stress dumped on you from suited executives who barely know your name? Are you scavenging for empty calories late at night after stuffing yourself full of vices to avoid feeling the pent-up frustration of wasted days? How long has it been since you’ve dreamed, really dreamed, about the life you want for yourself and your family? How long has it been since you’ve allowed yourself to believe your American Dream is worthy of pursuit?
I know it took me many months of introspection to see what my gut knew all along: I belong in books and words, never in boardrooms and suits. I am destined to create and achieve fulfillment and personal satisfaction through creation. I am destined to be in service to others seeking guidance on their paths to creative endeavors and pursuits. I am destined to dream often and big about what I can do to make the world a little better for having lived. I am destined to pursue my American Dream and live a beautiful, creative life.
My daughter will become a fearless dreamer because I took a risk and showed her it was okay to dream. She still has that notebook and pencil tucked away in a safe place, and she works on her story periodically in pockets of time around other activities.
Remember: Children rarely do what we tell them, but they become who we are.
If you encourage your children to use their imaginations and dream big, as I encourage my daughter, make sure you also spend time reminding yourself to do the same.
